gether. I buried the knife under a poplar a
few yards off where he fell. I could have thrown it in the river, but
they say things which have killed people always float. You will find it
if you dig for it under the big poplar-tree that they call the Grand
Duke's, because they say Pietro Leopoldo sat under it once on a time.
There was a little blood on the blade, but there was none anywhere else,
for he bled inwardly. They do if you strike right. I was a butcher's lad
once, and I used to kill the oxen, and I know. That is all.

"When I found the old rogue had no money with him I could have killed
him a score of times over. I cannot think how it was that he left home
without it, unless it was, as I say, that he meant to go back unknown
and unawares and surprise his wife with Melegari. That must have been
it, I think. For, greedy as he was over his money, he was greedier still
over his wife. I turned him over on his back, and left him lying there,
and I went back to the mill and began my day's work, till the people
came and wakened her and told the tale: then I left off work and came
and looked on like the rest of them. That is all."

The man who made the confession was calm and unmoved; the priest who
heard it was sick with horror, pale to the lips with agitation and
anguish.

"But his wife is accused! She may be condemned!" he cried, in agony.

"I know that," said the man, stolidly. "But you cannot tell of me. I
have told you under the seal of confession."

It was quite true: come what would, Gesualdo could never reveal what he
had heard. His eyes swam, his head reeled, a deadly sickness came upon
him; all his short life simple and harmless things had been around him;
he had been told of the crimes of men, but he had never been touched by
them; he had known of the sins of the world, but he had never realized
them. The sense that the murderer of Tasso Tassilo was within a hand's
breadth of him, that these eyes which stared at him, this voice which
spoke to him, were those of the actual assassin, that it was possible
and yet utterly impossible for him to help justice and save
innocence,--all this overcame him with its overwhelming burden of horror
and of divided duty. He lost all consciousness as he knelt there, and
fell heavily forward on the wood-work of the confessional.

His teachers had said aright, in the days of his novitiate, that he
would never be of stern enough stuff to deal with the realities of life.

Wh